Creativity Prompts for Writers, Journalers, Artists and Speakers

They came out of the tangled forest into the clearing with its ruins and waterfall. The falls’ spill down the high cliffs was soft in this season. Instead of churning the water, it merely spread and rippled around the cliff. The broad pool had a dark, almost black sheen, like sheets of best-quality silk dyed to the color of a moonless night. –Kate Elliott, Traitors’ Gate

Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a story set in the place described above.

Journaling Prompt: Write about the most beautiful wild place you’ve ever visited.

Art Prompt: Waterfall and ruins

Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Tell your audience the story of a hike you went on, paying particular attention to description that engages as many senses as possible.

Highway 16, the main route into my rural hometown of Emmett, Idaho, winds through a high desert country of sand and sagebrush before the road narrows and suddenly descends into the valley through a steep grade known as Freezeout Hill. –Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament by Evelyn I. Funda

Fiction Writing Prompt: Use the first line of the week as the starting point or inspiration for a scene, story, poem, or haiku.

Late in the evening, tired and happy and miles from home, they drew up on a remote common far from habitations, turned the horse loose to graze, and ate their simple supper sitting on the grass by the side of the cart. Toad talked big about all he was going to do in the days to come, while stars grew fuller and larger all around them, and a yellow moon, appearing suddenly and silently from nowhere in particular, came to keep them company and listen to their talk. –Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Fiction Writing Prompt: Set your story in a rural area where your characters have stopped along their journey.

Journaling Prompt: Write about a trip you took and your favorite stop along the way to get there.

Art Prompt: Stopping along the way

Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Tell your audience a story about a camping trip you took. Make a special appeal to the senses in your descriptions.

He was not a handsome man, precisely; for simple beauty he could not compete with Reeve Joss or the many handsome young Hundred men with their ready smiles and easy way of displaying muscled physiques. He had a different quality; he was the wind that bends trees, the river that cuts the earth with its fluid strength, the inexorable sand that buries stone. –Kate Elliott, Traitors’ Gate

Fiction Writing Prompt: Write the description of someone through your protagonist’s eyes. Make us see him or her without a physical description.

Journaling Prompt: How would you describe your character with similes?

Art Prompt: He was the wind that bends trees.

Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Tell your audience about someone with exceptional strength of character and what makes him or her stand out.

She came to a place where the stream flowed over a terrace of rock, from one level of moor down to another, and there a small pool had carved itself into the rock just beneath the rapids. The water fell less than a meter, and the stream was narrow enough to jump: but she remembered that stream and that pool because there in the circling water, caught beneath the splashing rapids, floated a frozen circle of foam. The water was naturally soft and peaty, and a yellow-white foam sometimes formed in the mountain streams of that area, blown by the winds and caught in the reeds, but she had never seen it collected into a circle like that and frozen. She laughed when she saw it. She waded in and carefully picked it up. It was only a little greater in diameter than the distance between her outstretched thumb and little finger and a few centimeters thick, not as fragile as she had at first feared. The frothy bubbles had frozen in the cold air and almost freezing water, making what looked like a tiny model of a galaxy: a fairly common spiral galaxy, like this one, like hers. She held the light confection of air and water and suspended chemicals and turned it over in her hands, sniffing it, sticking her tongue out and licking it, looking at the dim winter sun through it, flicking her finger to see if it would ring. She watched her little rime galaxy start to melt, very slowly, and saw her own breath blow across it, a brief image of her warmth in the air. Finally she put it back where she had found it, slowly revolving in the pool of water at the base of the small rapids. The galaxy image had occurred to her then, and she thought at the time about the similarity of the forces which shaped both the little and the vast. She had thought, And which is really the most important? but then felt embarrassed to have thought such a thing. Every now and again, though, she went back to that thought, and knew that each was exactly as important as the other. –Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a scene set in nature and focus on description.

Journaling Prompt: Write about the most inspiring moment you have experienced in nature.

Art Prompt: A galaxy in your hand

Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Tell your audience the story about a time when nature revealed its deeper secrets to you.

It is a city of neat cottages and cobbled streets where wander cats without number, for the enlightened legislators of long ago laid down laws for our protection. A good, kind village, where travelers take their ease and pet the cats, making much of them, which is as it should be. –A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a story, scene, poem, or haiku set in the city described above.

Journaling Prompt: Describe the kind of setting where you would like to live if money were no object.

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still,
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.
–I Stood Tiptoe by John Keats

Fiction Writing Prompt: Write a story that begins on the little hill described above.

Journaling Prompt: Write about the joys of an early morning walk.

Art Prompt: Early morning walk

Non-Fiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Share a story about an early morning walk. Describe your surroundings in a way that appeals to all the senses.